May 2007 Archives

I needed a break from Gravity's Rainbow so, in of Kurt Vonnegut, I reread Hocus Pocus, the first book I ever read by him.

It's not quite as great as I remember, but still pretty good. I read just about all of his books in the summer between my freshman and sophomore year of college. I had a job working in this multi-media lab called the "P.L.A.C.E." which stood for something like "Princeton Lab for Advancing Curriculum Excellence" or some ridiculous thing like that. It was a pretty boring job and, since I was mostly alone on campus, a pretty boring summer. My friend Shawn (bless his heart) stopped by to visit a couple of times and told me to read Vonnegut, so I did. And when I discover an author I like I keep reading his or her books until I get sick of them, but in the case of Vonnegut I never got sick of them, so I kept reading.

I didn't realize it at the time, but Hocus Pocus is set in a semi-dystopian near-future, though in this case the near-future is already the past (2001). In the book, America has pretty much fallen to the evils of capitalism, and the rich have sold off all the assets of the country to foreign interests. He could have just set this book in the real world (rather than this semi-real world) but I think his goal was to highlight that the wealthy "ruling-class" do not consider themselves countrymen with the poor and middle class -- not that they don't consider themselves Americans, but, rather, they don't consider everyone else Americans. I don't really think this adds that much to the book, though Vonnegut wouldn't be Vonnegut if he didn't present us a completely bleak and futile picture of the world.

Anyway, I'm slowly making my way through Gravity's Rainbow, which is funny and brilliant and impossible to read. I'm at the halfway point, which really is an accomplishment, because half of Gravity's Rainbow is the equivalent of reading four other good-sized books.

In a post-thesis high, I read the new Chuck Palahniuk book. Good or bad, I always plow through his books in a couple of days. This one, like most of his recent novels, was on the bad side of the spectrum. It's okay. Better than the last couple, I guess. Recently he's on this kick of building into his novels some meta-fictional justification of the novel, meaning he tries to "convince" the reader that this is not a fictional text but an actual history. I don't really get the point of that. It's never convincing and it comes across as gimmicky, usually underscoring the flawed logic of a fictional piece rather than making it more believable.

Like many of his novels, this one had a lot of plot twists. But in this one the plot twists didn't just alter the plot, they altered the entire novel. It was too jarring. Suddenly you're reading a novel about zombies. Then it's about class warfare. Then it's about the erotic thrill of car crashing ala Ballard. Then it's about TIME TRAVEL. I mean, what the heck? It was intriguing, but way too contrived. When plot twists get too radical they stop being clever and surprising but instead become concepts that the author is forcing onto the reader. I was never surprised because there was not enough setup.

I got the feeling that, like his last novel Haunted, Palahniuk was making use of existing short stories to beef up the text. They are slightly more integrated in this book, but still I'm suspicious. For example, every chapter is told via rotating view points (it's an "oral history") except for one chapter, which is a five page, single-view point discussion about some new direct-input-video technology. It's then mentioned later in the text and he tried to work it into the plot, but it's a weak connection. I feel like that chapter is just a way to either (a) make use of an existing short story, and/or (b) drop in one more clever plot point that doesn't really tie into the whole novel.

As always, I enjoy reading his books because they are fun and interesting and different, but if it took me longer than two days to get through them I wouldn't bother.

My velo-bound, ninety-three-acid-free-page thesis will be ready for pickup at four o'clock. All I need to do after that is track down my adviser, have him sign both copies, and turn it into the school.

My first conundrum was what to title this book track blog entry: "The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel by Amy Hempel" or just "The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel." The first seems somewhat redundant. But it's certainly possible that some Author X could title a book The Collected Stories of Author Y. The "by Author X" is NOT implied. And since the official title of the collection includes the "of Amy Hempel," I decided that consistency demanded I write out the "of" and the "by" in full.

This is a great collection of short stories. I read almost every one... and there are a LOT of short stories in this collection. Reading so many short stories back to back allows the reader to notice certain "patterns." Three reoccurring themes or plot-points stood out:

1) Stories about women who really like dogs.
2) Stories about women who have been in accidents or are in a hospital.
3) Strories about women who live across the street from a graveyards.

My guess is that one or more of these three apply to Amy Hempel herself, though I can't really say for sure since I don't know her.

The stories are usually not quite linear, and move forward in semi-disconnected chunks. Thus the plots are often unclear and secondary to the characters and the relationships. Most of the stories are short, and a lot of them are very short, just two or three pages. The one novella was also written in this manner and I felt that this style didn't work as well (for me) in the longer form. It's the one piece in the book I didn't finish reading.